Then he was shield to shield with the front rank, and he stabbed at their thighs and feet, ruthlessly sweeping the razor edges of his new sword across their tendons while his aspis went high. He collected their spears and pressed in like a lover against their chests.
Men began to fall.
The daimon took him, and he moved, spun, and cut as if guided by an invisible hand, or as if he was a dancer in a carefully practised routine. He stopped sensing time as a linear thing and moved through his opponents, seeing them as fractional images of the action — a descending back-cut through a man’s nose guard, a wrist-roll thrust with an off-axis left foot advance that penetrated through a man’s leather cuirass and his belly, a ripping blow from a heavy spearhead that chopped a piece from his shield rim — the spearman’s second attack, using the spear like a long-handled axe, and his response — deflection, avoidance, inside the spear’s reach, the man’s terrified eyes as Satyrus cut him down …
He saw the blow. The stop-start universe of instant to instant life and death showed him the little man’s spear as it came in from his unprotected right side — he was trying to withdraw his sword from his last victim, and the fine edge was stuck in bone — the realisation in less than half a heartbeat that he could never block the blow — the enemy spear — another spear driving into it, and Satyrus was alive, his sword ripped from his last victim, and over his shoulder Demetrios was glowing with triumph as he pulled his own spear out of the little man.
‘Saved your life,’ he said with real satisfaction.
Satyrus didn’t pause, as there were three men trying to kill him.
The beautiful sword stuck in the ribs of another victim, a few heartbeats later, and Satyrus was all but driven from his feet by a powerful blow to his shield — a man tripping and falling to his shield side, but the man was ideally positioned to topple him, and Satyrus went to one knee — spear thrusts clattered on his shield and one rang on his helmet, and his searching sword-hand found nothing in the gravel and rubble of the breach.
Achilles stabbed over his head, fast as the sting of a wasp — one, two, three — and the rapidity and force of his blows was godlike — the third blow sank the width of a man’s hand through an enemy shield, and the man screamed as his shield arm was ripped open by the needle point on the spear.
Baulked of a weapon, even a broken spear shaft, Satyrus rose, grabbed the injured man’s shield with his free hand, and spun the rim, breaking the man’s already injured arm and dislocating his shoulder. Stepping through him, Satyrus slammed the edge of his shield into the next man in the breach, catching his shield and driving it back into the man’s unprotected mouth, spraying teeth, and Satyrus took his spear as the man screamed and sank to his knees.
Now Satyrus was the point of a wedge, with Demetrios at one shoulder and Achilles at the other, and the defenders of the breach were hesitant, because the best men had been at the front and now the survivors were brittle.
The pause gave Satyrus time to realise that he’d been wounded twice, that his imperfectly-healed ribs were burning as if on fire and that the fight for the breach was almost won. One of his adversaries, bolder than the others, lunged overarm at his outstretched left leg where it projected from under his shield. He dropped the head of his spear and swept the weapon sideways as he passed his right foot forward — collected his opponent’s spear on his shaft, rotated his own and thrust with his sarauter, taking his opponent off line and in the throat, killing him instantly. And he heard Demetrios grunt in admiration. He hefted his spear, pivoted, and threw it at a man who was looking elsewhere, and who paid with his life for his inattention, and then Satyrus let his aspis fall off his arm, collected a big rock — formerly part of the wall — and threw it into the enemy rank — just a little above the upper rim of a front-ranker’s shield. The man raised his shield and was knocked flat as the weight of the rock took him.
Demetrios was there, and ten other men — into the gap, widening it like workmen with chisels working marble, and in the time it took Satyrus to stoop and recover his shield, the defenders were pushed back out of the breach.
‘Take my sword,’ Achilles said.
Satyrus turned his head, saw the offered hilt, and took it. He spat. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘But I think this is done.’ Nonetheless, he picked up his shield and took his time fitting it correctly on his arm.
Hypaspists pushed past them, desperate to get to their king, who was now three horse lengths ahead, and Satyrus was carried forward by the rush. Someone’s spear point opened the back of his calf like a line of fire on his skin — careless bastard.
Satyrus moved to his right, and again to his right, pushed forward by the relentless pressure of the hypaspists but controlling his approach. The enemy were falling back and back, trying to rally, trying not to run.
Satyrus saw the flashes of new crests and well-made helmets over the beaten defenders — reinforcements.
‘Form up, there!’ he bellowed, but his accent was Greek, not Macedonian, and the eager men around him ignored him. The hypaspists pressed forward in a mob, their spears upright or pinned against them by the press.
The enemy — the beaten enemy — turned their heads, almost as one, like a flock of birds changing direction in the air. And then they opened their ranks — not well, but well enough — and let the newcomers through. The exchange of ranks took fifty heartbeats, and during that time the new enemy were vulnerable, but the hypaspists weren’t in order to make a cohesive attack, and mostly they gathered around their king and walled him off from the fighting.
And then the enemy attacked. They were mercenaries — most of them political exiles with a burning hate for Demetrios and his pseudo-democratic ways, and they crashed into the disorganised hypaspists and drove them back ten paces, killing as they came, and in the time it takes an Olympian to run the stade, Satyrus was in the front rank.
His opponent had a magnificent crest on one of the new helmets — a small, fitted Attic helmet with engraving on every surface. He had a thick blond beard under the cheek-plates, and he slammed his spear into Satyrus’s aspis with the confidence of the larger man.
Satyrus shuffled back to absorb the impact of the man’s spear, and then stepped forward — push with the back, right thigh, lead left, collect balance, and he was under Blond Beard’s spear, pressing shield to shield — Blond Beard trying to stab almost straight down over the locked shields. Satyrus stooped to get the pushing face of his aspis under the other man’s rim, and as the man responded to that threat, sliced the edge of his sword across the other man’s instep — flicked it back into the man’s unprotected ankle under his greaves, and then powered forward against him, making him stumble back and fall into his own line …
Now Achilles was next to him, and he put his spear point through a man’s face, and the enemy line paused.
But Demetrios’s hypaspists were not Alexander’s hypaspists, and they were still not in fighting order. A dozen or more — twenty, perhaps — were clustered around Satyrus and Achilles, but the rest had surrounded the king and forced him down the ramp.
‘We’re fucked,’ Achilles said.
Satyrus spat. He’d been wounded again, and the futility of the whole fight was overweighing the daimon.
He backed a step, and Achilles matched him.
He backed three more steps, and he was in the breach. The hypaspist on his left locked up, their aspides touching, and Achilles’ rank partner did the same, and they almost filled the breach.
Satyrus risked a look over his shoulder.
Demetrios was screaming at someone, his voice rough with strain, but his men were forcing him out of the breach. The rest were clearly intent on retreat, except the handful already committed to standing with Satyrus and Achilles.